I heard on the news that she was responding to two part commands last night: "If you can hear me, give me a thumbs up." Which really has several parts- I have to hear you, figure out what you asked me to do, and then make the appropriate response to what you asked. And they're starting to wean her from the sedation, which is good.

Where did the bullet enter her brain? I've heard that it went in over her left eye, but I've also heard it went in by her left ear and exited over her left eye (i.e., the shooter was behind her). Has the shooter given any indication why he did it?

There were some pictures of the Green family at the little girl's funeral on the news last night too. How very sad. She barely got a chance to live her life.

I've been Boo'd... right off the stage!

Aaahh, I have been defrosted! Thank you, Bonny and Asiel!
Brrrr, I've been Frosted! Thank you, Asiel and Pomtzu!

"That's the power of kittens (and puppies too, of course): They can reduce us to quivering masses of Jell-O in about two seconds flat and make us like it. Good thing they don't have opposable thumbs or they'd surely have taken over the world by now." -- Paul Lukas

Ex Gov. Blagojevich on the Illinois tax increase

Gov. Quinn signed an increase in the state income tax (up to 5% individuals and 7% corporations) yesterday.

Today on the noon news ex-Gov. Blagojevich was quoted as saying he thinks the legislators were cowards for waiting until after the Nov. election to implement a tax increase, and if he were still governor he would review the state budget and make program cuts before raising taxes. ... Dude! You and your hyperinflated state budget are the reason Illinois got into this financial disaster in the first place!! Blago is s uch a poseur.

I've been Boo'd... right off the stage!

Aaahh, I have been defrosted! Thank you, Bonny and Asiel!
Brrrr, I've been Frosted! Thank you, Asiel and Pomtzu!

"That's the power of kittens (and puppies too, of course): They can reduce us to quivering masses of Jell-O in about two seconds flat and make us like it. Good thing they don't have opposable thumbs or they'd surely have taken over the world by now." -- Paul Lukas

I heard on the news that she was responding to two part commands last night: "If you can hear me, give me a thumbs up." Which really has several parts- I have to hear you, figure out what you asked me to do, and then make the appropriate response to what you asked. And they're starting to wean her from the sedation, which is good.

Where did the bullet enter her brain? I've heard that it went in over her left eye, but I've also heard it went in by her left ear and exited over her left eye (i.e., the shooter was behind her). Has the shooter given any indication why he did it?

There were some pictures of the Green family at the little girl's funeral on the news last night too. How very sad. She barely got a chance to live her life.

The bullet went in over the left eye, and came out above the left ear. So her speech and right side movement might be affected, Initially it was said the bullet went from back to front - they have since changed that.

According to an article I read today, she is not moving her right hand nearly as well as the left one. Until she is extubated no one will know about her speech. The fact that she can follow commands, and initiate spontaneous movement - scratching her nose - is all very good news. She can understand what people are saying, and can process the words.

Senator Gillibrand spoke with Brian Williams yesterday.

"Mark was telling us just a couple days ago how he was telling the doctors, she will be walking in a few weeks, you'll see."

The shooter is mentally ill, and it is likely even if he gives a "reason" it will not make sense to anyone but himself anyway. His YouTube posts are full of nonsensical statements and self-contradicting ones, so I doubt we will ever get a "reason why" that makes sense to anyone but himself.

This is a wonderful article from the NT Times - From Bloody Scene to E.R., Life-Saving Choices in Tucson. It may not be for everyone to read - those who faint at the sight of blood, for instance - but as a former ER nurse, I found it fascinating.

It's also in the NY Times, and apparently some have problems getting onto that particular site. If you can't get on, and are interested, PM me your email address, and I will have them send you the link.

Lead Story
Blame Righty: A condensed history
By Michelle Malkin • January 14, 2011 08:54 AM

Image via Zazzle

On Monday, as the progressive smear machine worked overtime to pin the horrific Tucson massacre on conservatives and to squelch political opposition by targeting Tea Party/limited-government rhetoric, I published “The progressive “climate of hate:” An illustrated primer, 2000-2010.”

Today’s column provides another primer for the amnesia-wracked blamestream media on just how widespread the Blame Righty meme has been over the past two years. Regular readers of this blog are well aware of this expanding litany outlined below. You are also well aware of the cunning ability of the Left to hinder exposure of this sordid history by accusing its chroniclers and whistle-blowers of “playing the victim.” Sarah Palin is the most prominent conservative to encounter this tactic, but she is by no means the first conservative public figure to experience it. Kabuki outrage over her use of the term “blood libel” is an intended distraction from the history outlined below that undergirds her message. The political speech suppressors have honed their craft long and well.

The solution isn’t to “tone it down” and turn the other cheek, but to confront them forcefully with the facts — and to fight back unapologetically against insidious efforts to diminish the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech and activism of the Right in the name of repressive “civility.”

I agree with President Obama. When it comes to politicizing random violence, he and his supporters have been “far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than” they do. Recognition is the first step toward reconciliation. It’s time to recognize the poisonous pervasiveness of the Blame Righty meme.

For the past two years, Democrat officials, liberal activists, and journalists have jumped to libelous conclusions about individual shooting sprees committed by mentally unstable loners with incoherent delusions all over the ideological map. The White House now pledges to swear off “pointing fingers or assigning blame.” Alas, the Obama administration’s political and media foot soldiers have proven themselves incapable of such restraint.

In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill instructor and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski’s homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprits of the spree were the “heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces” (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly online).

That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others, and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the Left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent of undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, liberal mega-website Huffington Post commenters had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the “huge anti–immigrant backlash in this country” – never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism, and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.

In June 2009, a depraved, elderly anti-Semite named James von Brunn gunned down a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent and lefty Center for American Progress think-tank fellow Matthew Yglesias immediately invoked the Obama administration’s report on right-wing extremism, leading to a wider chorus of condemnations against the Tea Party, talk radio, and the entire GOP. The truth? Von Brunn was an unstable, equal-opportunity hater and 9/11 Truther conspiracy loon who bashed Jews and Christians, George W. Bush and Fox News, and had also threatened the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a window-smashing vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. The state party chair, Pat Waak, singled out Tea Party activists and blamed “people opposed to health care” for the attack. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far Left transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for a labor union-tied political committee and canvassed for a Democrat candidate.

In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts” in an online magazine post titled “No Suicide,” which decried the “Kentucky lynching.” Liberal author Richard Benjamin blamed “anti-government” bile. New York magazine fingered conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh, “conservative media personalities, websites, and even members of Congress.” So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.

In February 2010, ticking time-bomb professor Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at University of Alabama-Huntsville and suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Mainstream journalists from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton leaped forward to tie the crimes to Tea Party rhetoric. Never mind that Bishop was an Obama-worshiping academic with a lifelong history of violence or that Stack was another Bush-hater outraged about everything from George W. Bush to the American medical system to the evils of capitalism to the city of Austin, the Catholic Church, and airlines.

In May 2010, liberal New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to preemptively pin the Times Square bombing attempt on “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The culprit was unrepentant Muslim jihadist Faisal Shahzad.

In August 2010, Democrat supporters of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan blamed a “firebombing” at the congressman’s St. Louis office on Tea Party suspects. The real perpetrator? Disgruntled progressive activist Chris Powers, enraged over a paycheck dispute.

President Obama wisely counseled the nation this week at the Tucson massacre memorial that “Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.” But as the progressive Left’s smear-stained recent history shows, criminalizing conservatism is a hard habit to break.

Doctors performed a procedure Saturday morning that helps protect U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' airway but frees her from a ventilator that she's been on since being wounded in a shooting a week ago.

Doctors removed a breathing tube from the 40-year-old Arizona congresswoman and replaced it with a tracheotomy tube in her windpipe, according to an update from University Medical Center.

Giffords has been breathing on her own for several days, but doctors kept the breathing tube in place as a precaution, Dr. Peter Rhee, University Medical Center's chief of trauma, said Friday.

Surgeons also inserted a feeding tube to provide nutrition to the wounded congresswoman.

Both procedures are not uncommon among brain-injured patients in the intensive-care unit, according to the report. Giffords is still listed in critical condition.

Another shooting victim, James Tucker, was discharged Saturday, leaving only Giffords and two other victims of the Jan. 8 rampage as patients at the medical center.

Susan Hileman and George Morris remained in the hospital Saturday. Both were listed in good condition.

A week after Giffords was shot in the head at point-blank range in a rampage that left six dead and 13 wounded, she continued to improve significantly and is able to track with her eyes and has the ability to move her arms and legs, doctors reported Friday.

Wednesday marked the first time that Giffords opened her eyes spontaneously. On Thursday, she began a physical-therapy routine after showing doctors she could lift both arms and legs when held upright by medical staff.

All the surviving victims, one would think that goes without saying, blue. I am glad Rep. Gifford is making progress, but hope everyone knows it will be a long, slow road - brain injuries are tricky beasts, and no matter how many media folks claim "miracle" it is good medical care as well as her own strength that are helping her through this.

If only that was what she said. Unfortunately there seems to be only one victim she is concerned about. If she wants to make a "Medical Marvel" thread about Gifford's injury that would be in better taste as it is no longer political. Besides the guy was a nut and didnt commit a politically motivated crime.

Rep Giffords isnt the first person to survive a GSW to the head. People have survived much worse injuries and lived to tell about it, so I agree this isnt a miracle.

The President turned the Arizona Memorial into a Pep/Campaign Rally, including TShirts. Never let a crisis, in this case a tragedy, go to waste.

The only thing that makes any common sense in all of this is the lady who lost her mother in the shooting. Jared needed help & never received any, it could of been prevented was her thought. She forgives Jared for shooting & killing her mother.

Then there is the fella that everyone is fussing about with the magical announcers voice that is getting help from the all corners of the U.S. & even going into rehab. It is like what are the priorities in this country of ours?